About Artist & Art Details

Sarah Shaw creates works which hover between figuration and abstraction, allowing the viewer the space to impose their own interpretation. Her dexterous paintings speak of a belief in the enduring vitality of painting as a primary form of communication.

Sarah Shaw graduated from Falmouth College of Art in 2001. She primarily works in oil on canvas or paper but her paintings have also been translated into beautiful silkscreen and giclee limited edition prints.

She describes her inspiration as deriving from “a very quiet place, almost a place of meditation.” Her creativity centres on conditions “where an edgy quietness falls.” She strives to inject her work with enough room for personal interpretation by creating images that elegantly hover in a place between figuration and non-figuration.

Shaw explains that her process “seems to always revolve around building up and stripping down of imagery, exploring different painterly languages than reducing down to the lowest denominator.” By stripping down specific images and thoughts she captures a precise moment in time. These snatches of images, sounds and thoughts form a coherence which describes as “like a painterly slideshow of memory.”